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When it comes to violence, liberal democracy has proven to be a remarkably Teflon ideology.  Closer to our own time, Catholic support for right-wing dictatorships in Latin America seemingly proved the inherently authoritarian nature of the Church, while U.S. support for those regimes led merely to earnest, soul-searching ruminations on the troubled journey or uncertain victory of American liberalism.  Catholicism in the modern world has never had the luxury of acknowledging its dirty hands only as evidence of mistakes made in the past.  This is one of many reasons why Catholic social thought offers a uniquely valuable resource for thinking about our dirty hands in the present.

Christopher Shannon teaches at Saint Mary's College in Indiana.

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Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners and Book of the Week include:

Divine Numbers | Can you say "Christian" and "mathematics" in the same sentence? (Feb. 10, 2003)

Getting Beyond Victimology | A provocative collection of essays for "the black silent majority." (Feb. 3, 2003)

Strange Bedfellows | Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Caldwell collaborate on a collection of political writing. Has the millennium arrived unnoticed? (Jan. 27, 2003)

Encounters of the Gods | Christianity and Native American religion in early America. (Jan. 20, 2003)

Books Present, Books Past, and Books to Come | Plus: A new format for this column. (Jan. 13, 2003)

Double Indemnity Meets Dead Souls | A conversation with novelist Richard Dooling. (Jan. 6, 2003)

Books of the Year | The top ten. (OK—make that twelve.) (Dec. 30, 2002)

Entertain Us | Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the rapture of distress. (Dec. 16, 2002)

Boys Will Be Boys | A new book by a leading Christian feminist scholar inadvertently reveals the flawed assumptions underlying much talk about "flexibility" in gender roles. (Dec. 9, 2002)

Street Cred | Dave Eggers: The portrait of an artist as a … what? (Dec.2, 2002)

Epicurus'—and Darwin's—Dangerous Idea | How we became hedonists. (Nov. 18, 2002)

Weird Science? | A Darwinian debate continues. (Nov. 11, 2002)

Of Moths and Men Revisited | A Darwinian debate. (Nov. 4, 2002)

Angels in Heaven | A game that's more than a game. (Oct. 28, 2002)

Number One with a Bullet | America's foist family as a tool for evangelism. (Oct. 21, 2002)

Train Up a Child | Helping children to become intimately familiar with Scripture. (Oct. 14, 2002)

Acting Like Those 'Evangelicals' | Guilty as charged? (Sept. 30, 2002)

Ugly Evangelicals | Is this us? (Sept. 23, 2002)

Herbie Goes Bananas | The rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of the VW Beetle. (Sept. 16, 2002)

So Far, So Near | A graduate of Murree Christian School in Pakistan, the site of a deadly assault by Islamic terrorists in August, reflects on his growing-up years, on what has changed in the interim, and on the beleaguered Christian community in Pakistan (Sept. 9, 2002)

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47